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GigaTrust Extends In-Use Document Protection to the Cloud

New GigaCloud service provides a Software-as-a-Service security framework for sharing documents and emails across different endpoints and organizations.

Keeping confidential information and data in the hands of authorized users is an increasingly difficult task in the modern world, when a simple email that might contain sensitive information, can be shared with the click of a button. GigaTrust is in the business for providing document and email encryption protection and is now extending those capabilities with a new Software-as-a-Service cloud offering called GigaCloud.

GigaTrust's document and email protection capabilities are already deployed by banks, healthcare companies and government agencies including the U.S Department of Veterans Affairs. Robert Bernardi, founder, chairman, president and CEO, GigaTrust, explained that his company provides in-use document protection. What that means is when content is shared with an individual, the shared content is protected by usage rules for actions including copying, sharing and printing.

"We have made our platform easy to deploy in an enterprise environment, but we've had a lot of customers ask for additional features," Bernardi told eWEEK.

With the growing use of mobile devices and cloud based file sharing services, there is a need to extend in-use document protection beyond the confines of an enterprise deployment. The new GigaCloud service brings GigaTrust's platform to the cloud, providing enhanced mobility and collaboration capabilities for working with and protecting content.

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"The goal of GigaCloud is to provide an anyone-to-anyone, easy to use communication and collaboration platform where you can provide in-use document protection outside of the enterprise," Bernardi said.

As such, a document that is stored in a cloud file sharing service can now be protected with GigaCloud as easily as a document that an organization is sending from within the enterprise to another organization. Within a single enterprise, sharing protected content is typically easier as all the users often are known and mapped to some form of enterprise directory system.

When extending in-use document protection outside of an enterprise, GigaTrust has also had to extend its' insight into new groups of outside users as well. As an example scenario, Bernardi explained that if two banks want to communicate with each other, and one bank is a GigaCloud customer and the other is not, there is a system in place to extend security policies to the non-customer bank.

For the GigaCloud customer bank, an endpoint client or mobile app is pushed out to all users. All users of the client bank are then connected into the system and protected by enforced policies for in-use documents. The GigaCloud customer bank will need to setup the non-GigaCloud customers as tenants on the platform, providing access to communicate. Bernardi emphasized that the non-GigaCloud customers don't have to pay a separate license fee to be able to communicate securely with GigaCloud customers. The non-GigaCloud customers are all joined into the GigaCloud customer's trust group, with client applications and mobile apps made available for download.

Beyond just protecting documents with policies and encryption, GigaCloud also has a feature called Data OverWatch that provides visibility into document usage. Bernardi explained that all content transactions are logged by the GigaCloud system. All the logs are then stored in a database that can be analyzed by a system administrator to see what information was shared by a given user and with whom.

"If a user tries to do something nefarious with information that is protected by GigaCloud, the administrator will instantly get an alert," Bernardi said.

Additionally the GigaCloud platform provides a content classification system that looks at documents and emails to help identify potentially sensitive information that needs to be protected. In that regard, Bernardi noted that GigaCloud is somewhat like a Digital Loss Prevention (DLP) solution, though he emphasized that the collaboration and sharing capabilities make the GigaTrust approach more robust.

"The conundrum has always been that the more secure the network becomes, the less you can communicate," Bernardi said. "We have solved the issue by building some innovative clients that allow for full communications between outside parties that is extremely easy."

Looking forward, GigaTrust has plans to extend its document protection beyond just business to business, but also to the business to consumer realm as well.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.